Yann Arthus-Bertrand has been passionate about nature and the animal world for as long as he can remember. He discovered his vocation in his early thirties, on an expedition to Kenya with his wife Anne. Over the next three years, Yann increasingly used photography to record his observations of a family of lions in the wild. So commenced a lifelong career devoted to photographic testimony. On return to France in 1981, Yann became a photojournalist, publishing his first book Lions. This was followed by a variety of works using aerial photography, including La Terre vue du ciel: a photographic inventory of the world's finest landscapes viewed from above, based on research sponsored by Unesco. In 2009, an exhibition of his 6 Milliards d'autres (6 Billion Others) project was staged at the Grand Palais in Paris: video footage of 5,000 interviews with men and women across the world, on a variety of themes. Yann is also the founder of a non-profit organization called GoodPlanet. He is the director of a full-length motion picture. Called Home, the film deals with the state of our planet and was released worldwide on lune 5 2009 for multimedia broadcast (cinema, TV, DVD, internet). In zoo6, Yann was elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts (French academy of fine arts) and in April 2009 he was designated Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations Environment Program.